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Shimer College Wiki:Texts
The public-domain texts on Shimer College Wiki are of two types: documents related to Shimer College history, and texts taught at some point in the history of the school. To avoid possible conflicts with other treatments, the full text should be placed at PAGENAME/Text. For long texts with subsections that may be of independent interest, most or all of this text should in turn be transcluded from subpages of /Text, e.g. PAGENAME/Text/McKee_Hall. Shimer history texts Shimer curriculum texts Any public-domain text that is or ever has been assigned as part of a Shimer course may be incorporated into this wiki, with particular emphasis on those that have been part of the core Great Books curriculum. Differentiation from other projects In general, close readings of specific texts have not found a welcome home on the Wikimedia projects. They are insufficiently encyclopedic for Wikipedia, too encyclopedic for Wikisource, and insufficiently textbook-like for Wikibooks. (This would obviously go double for any such treatment specifically focused on Shimer College.) Even close treatments of extremely prominent texts such as the Bible have received a choppy treatment on Wikipedia, including occasional nominations for deletion. See for example Wikipedia:Votes_for_deletion/Matthew_1 (kept), Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Akilam One (deleted and later redirected to the article on the main work). It seems likely that anyone attempting to add such a treatment of, e.g., Hegel's Philosophy of Right would receive the "Akilam One" treatment if their work wasn't speedily-deleted out of hand. Wikipedia is thus a hostile environment for work of this kind. Similar considerations apply to the other projects. While early conceptions of Wikisource might have been friendly to such an approach, the project as it exists today is focused on transcription rather than interpretation, and even original translations receive an increasingly (and understandably) frosty reception. Likewise, the original open-ended conception of Wikibooks has given way to a focus on preparing textbooks; the project defines itself as "the open-content textbooks collection that anyone can edit." Wikibooks does allow some annotated texts, but only within a very narrow range. The Wikisource page on "Wikisource_and_Wikibooks" makes for instructively confusing reading. It seems clear that an open-ended project focused on accumulating as much information as possible about the individual subsections of work, as is envisioned here, would be unwelcome on either project. The openings left by these projects can be seen by reviewing their treatments of a common Shimerian text like the Euthyphro: wikipedia:Plato's Euthyphro, wikibooks:Plato/Euthyphro, wikisource:Euthyphro. The same considerations that differentiate this treatment of source texts from Wikisource also, for the most part, differentiate it from other major online text repositories such as Perseus and Project Gutenberg. Gutenberg, like Wikisource, focuses on transcription of specific editions only; Perseus provides a greater level of information on the source text, but does not provide a home for interpretation and commentary. The approach taken on this project, therefore, can meet a need that is otherwise largely unmet for these texts, both globally and in Shimer-specific terms. Special subpage format for Great Books texts Example: * Euthyphro: Brief profile of the work (possibly extracted from wikipedia:Plato's Euthyphro, summary of Shimer connections/mentions ** Euthyphro/Text: Transclusion of full Greek text *** Euthyphro/Text/2a: Different treatments of this text, transcluded from the following subsections: **** Euthyphro/Text/2a/Greek: Greek text (possibly extracted from wikisource:el:Ευθύφρων), with 'd annotations as needed **** Euthyphro/Text/2a/Language: Marked-up text for language study, with links to Wiktionary &c. **** Euthyphro/Text/2a/Discussion: General agglomeration of interesting things that have been said about this passage, whether as part of the Great Conversation, the Shimer conversation, etc. **** Euthyphro/Text/2a/Jowett: Jowett translation, extracted from wikisource:Euthyphro **** Euthyphro/Text/2a/Translation: An alternative open-licensed translation developed with an emphasis on Shimerian applications (can obviously have more than one of these) Category:Reading Category:Guidelines